I moved my personal diary to
vitanuova.loyalty.org;
I just wanted to remind people who might be interested (if they
didn't read the recent diary entries page over the weekend).

Victimless crimes

ishamael wonders (basically) why police enforce
laws against "victimless crimes". I thought of four general
reasons, but I didn't finish writing up my description of those
reasons, so I'll have to get back to everybody if I do.

BBC

I'm going to work with Andrew tomorrow and we're planning to have a
small number of 1.5.9 or 1.5.9.2 to give out at a LUG meeting in
Southern California later this month where Mike is speaking.

I had a nice time with Zack this weekend and got to talk to him a
bunch, have dinner, and do some errands.

I found my CueCat and scanned a bunch of books. (I hadn't scanned
anything since moving, because I misplaced the CueCat when I moved,
so that's quite a few books already.) I still haven't
published my scripts, just because I'm ashamed of how ad hoc
they are. No great elegance, generality, modularity; just quick
hacks. And they work really well, but I'm still ashamed to publish
them.

I talked to Zack a bit about computer chess, and he showed me a
really excellent chess-playing program called
Crafty. We're
curious whether we could make this run on a Mosix cluster (say)
and do deeper or faster game tree searches. I wish we had some
extremely strong players to make Crafty play against in case we
managed to make that work.

We met our new landlord, signed a lease, and are now officially
tenants here. Our first rent check is due by April Fool's Day.

Maybe I should have a housewarming party.

I had a great time at the Anarchist Book Fair with Anirvan. I
bought several books (and a t-shirt which said "Free speech is
for everybody"; I passed up the Proudhon "to be governed" shirt,
but I did get a copy of Proudhon's What is Property?).
Afterward, we went to the three bookstores in the 9th and Irving
area until dark, and then we spent a while chatting afterward.
It's really hard to resist buying books: I ended up buying
at least one book everywhere I went that was selling them today.

Chelsea Books was my source for the very interesting Computer
Chess Compendium, edited by David Levy -- a very large
collection of technical papers on the problems encountered in trying
to write chess-playing AI programs. There are all sorts of
discussions of position evaluation functions, heuristics, and game
tree pruning. I'm sure that some good work has been done since the
book was published, but I've never seen any of this
material explained in print beyond basic game tree material.

It was very surprising to learn there that American laws regulate
sexually explicit material because it's (considered) offensive rather
than because it's (considered) harmful. But such is the view of CA7.

The main worry about
obscenity, the main reason for its proscription,
is not that it is harmful, which is the worry
behind the Indianapolis ordinance, but that it is
offensive. A work is classified as obscene not
upon proof that it is likely to affect anyone's
conduct, but upon proof that it violates
community norms regarding the permissible scope
of depictions of sexual or sex-related activity.
[Citations omitted.]
Obscenity is to
many people disgusting, embarrassing, degrading,
disturbing, outrageous, and insulting, but it
generally is not believed to inflict temporal (as
distinct from spiritual) harm; or at least the
evidence that it does is not generally considered
as persuasive as the evidence that other speech
that can be regulated on the basis of its
content [...].
There are people who believe that some
forms of graphically sexual expression, not
necessarily obscene in the conventional legal
sense, may incite men to commit rape, or to
disvalue women in the workplace or elsewhere,
see, e.g., Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words
(1993); but that is not the basis on which
obscenity has traditionally been punished. No
proof that obscenity is harmful is required
either to defend an obscenity statute against
being invalidated on constitutional grounds or to
uphold a prosecution for obscenity. Offensiveness
is the offense.

This is surprising to me. I don't believe other courts would
generally agree. (The famous judge Richard Posner wrote this
decision; it's interesting to compare it with an earlier
decision of his that nude dancing is protected by the first
amendment.)

There's something happening here

I speculated in a message to Wolfgang about an emerging political
movement with a nexus around free speech, free software, and
transparency in technology. I keep running into the same people
over and over again in different issues (I made a list); somehow
there almost seems to be a consensus in certain circles on a
whole range of seemingly not-quite-connected issues. I'd like to
write some more about that.

I don't want to make the overreaching speculations that people
have come to associate with Jon Katz. He's not a bad writer, but
everything with him, but everything, seems to be a
revolutionary social paradigm shift. And I just don't think
that's right. That's where Wired has often run into
trouble: they look for a vast significance in everything. And I
don't blame them; I look for a vast significance in everything,
and I always suspect that everything has a vast significance.
But Wired, say, or Jon Katz, is always telling you
they've found it: every month, or every week, they've got the
key.

Well, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; and sometimes a technology
is just a technology, a technologist just a technologist.

Still, I think there's an interesting and somewhat concrete pattern.
I don't know just what it is. I keep running into the same
people.

Friday

There were some meetings and conversations at Linuxcare relating to
the merger with Turbolinux.

I felt a little sick in the afternoon and mostly better. We're
still poking at the BBC kernel.

I talked for a while with Andrew about the BBC and tried to get him
oriented to work on updating the kernel. He made a lot of contributions
to the released 1.5 but has never yet built a BBC by himself. I hope
that will change now!

I also wrote to Dunc about getting BBC development
on a machine on the public Internet, not behind Linuxcare's
firewall.

Books

Wolfgang told me I should read a book called Personal
Knowledge, so I ordered it.

I also got a shipment of books I ordered from
Dover. Yay! These
included several Gardner titles. I'm now missing only 44 of 111
Gardner titles on my bibliography, and I have about 10 or 12
"Gardner-interest" books (Festschrift for Gardner or introduction
by him or acknowledgment to him or dedication to him).

Melymbrosia

She glanced at the book which she knew of course and said to Cynthia in a
low voice, 'Have you read the Religio Medici?'. The
last word she spoke as though it were the name of a great Italian family.
Now it happened that Cynthia had read the book, and possessed it, for the
title together perhaps with some stray word or portrait had charmed her
when she was first beginning to read.

For long the divine properties of that strange volume acted only in
a curious and tantalising fashion. She could not have told you what the
writing was about; often she laid it down in distress and fatigue; but the
words lured her on, with a promise distinct though not definable, of
wondrous caverns, and vast luminous vistas concealed below them, and in
time they came to undermine her visible world with a labyrinth of dark
channels, and to expand her heaven. Even now that she was a grown woman
she could start herself on some whimsical flight infinitely pleasant to
her, by reading certain words.

"Yes," she answered, "I know it."

(From the earliest existing fragment of Melymbrosia, the
early version of Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out.
This is from Extant Draft A, Appendix B, p. 267 of the published version
of Melymbrosia, edited by Louise A. DeSalvo. Thanks, mom.)